Radio interviews and dripping snot.
January 7th, 2009
I had my first radio interview this morning for ‘Sleeping Around’ with Tim Cox on ABC Hobart. It’s the first of many interviews on the publicity junket for the book. Except there isn’t much junket-ing going on because they didn’t actually fly me to Hobart. I went into the ABC studios in Melbourne and sat in a tiny room called ‘The Tardis’ and spoke ‘live’ to Tim in the studio in Hobart. It was also for ABC Hobart that I did my first ever radio interview for ‘Rule No.5: No sex on the bus’ about eight years ago. That interview went well particularly since I had a bad cold and had to keep wiping my dripping nose with my sleeve. But, I did make a bit of an ass of myself in the middle of the interview, however. We had a ‘break’ while the announcer played a song and I said to my publicist, who was sitting opposite me: ‘Have you got any tissues? I’m dripping SNOT EVERYWHERE!’ To which Tim replied: ‘Thanks Brian, we’re still on air.’
It was also in the same studio when I could have (and should have) used a major ’stuff up’ to my advantage. I was sitting in one of the ‘Tardis’ booths waiting to do an interview with ABC Darwin for my book ‘Where’s Wallis?’ when the producer’s voice came through the headphones: ‘Okay Bryce, we’re on in thirty seconds’. She hadn’t got my name wrong. I knew that because I could see who was sitting in the booth next to me. It was only Australia’s biggest selling author Bryce Courtney. I said, ‘I’m not Bryce,’ and they switched over to him. But, what I should have done is pretended I was Bryce and then said: ‘I don’t want to talk about my book, I want to talk about this new brilliant and funny book by Brian Thacker!’ And then spent the next 20 minutes talking about ‘Where’s Wallis?’